I have been feverishly working for the last couple of months juggling numerous important (and often very fun) tasks. The speaking engagements this summer have also been keeping me incredibly busy. And for every additional second I could steal from sleep, I have been busy working to build this web presence.

So, here you have it: my first blog post on what I hope becomes, over time, a really helpful resource for educators--as the name states: a source of ideas for practical practice. You will notice that only one category exists at the moment--the catch-all: "general." I'm going to allow the categories to evolve over time as they seem to want to create themselves.

Web development is always an art and a science. I am more the artist than the scientist when it comes to creating the CSS files that design the content of the page. I wish I knew far more than I do. As web masters know, browser compatibility is a huge issue when creating sites. So, if you want an interesting experience, check out this page in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Safari, and Firefox. I find it amazing (and terrorizing as well, when it comes to design) that the same code can perform so differently in the different tools.

Every web master I know grouses about Internet Explorer. I'm learning why. So, if you're going to use a browser to visit my site (instead of an RSS feed reader), I highly recommend using Safari or Firefox. I'll invest more time later fixing some of the bugs in IE. But for now: a blog is born, and I'm a proud papa!

This is the first time in the last 45 years that I haven't been in school on the first day of school. Wow! It really has felt very, very different.

But I want to extend my sincere appreciation to all of the teachers, principals, curriculum specialists, and superintendents who have allowed me to share in your opening of the 2007 - 2008 school year. I've traveled thousands of miles in the last few weeks doing workshops, keynotes, and staff development activities in schools and school systems across the country. And today, here in New Jersey, I have concluded all of my pre-planning work for this school year.

I remain convinced that America's educators are a dedicated, hard-working group of people who live a mission. We should all be very proud of and lend our full support to our educators. Here's to a great year of academic achievement!

I spent this past week in a remote area of the Smoky Mountains. I say it was remote because I felt rather disconnected. My cell phone didn't have low signal strength but stated instead, "no signal." Internet was only available via dialing up a long distance telephone number or through a satellite connection. Naturally, I chose the satellite connection. More times than not, however, I would get a "Satellite upload link error. Please try to connect again later." message. And most of the time when I could get a connection, the data would trickle in just one kilobyte at a time--literally!

I realized just how important my being connected, being plugged in, being that "live node on the network" is to me. No, I take that back. It's essential to me. But I think we have to be connected on at least two levels: in our immediate space with those we know and love, and in our virtual spaces (the cell phone and the internet). The substance of both of those levels of connection is vitally important, not just the connection itself. In that regard, I've had some interesting conversations with students about how social networking sites like MySpace an FaceBook are redefining their concept of "friends."

"My mom said that none of my online 'friends' are going to put their arm around me when I'm sick. None of them are going to be there when I really need someone." Seems to me that mom is teaching her daughter balance between being a node on a network and being a human being in the here and now. Finding that wonderful, meaningful balance between all of the things that compete for our attention is increasingly hard to do as the number of things entering the competition increases exponentially along with the vigor with which they compete.

Perhaps because I couldn't be that live node on the network this past week, I noticed a few more things that may have otherwise not caught my attention. About half of the drivers who passed me, waved at me. In the 20 years I've lived in Atlanta, I don't think anyone has ever waved at me as I drove by, except for that one unfortunate incident a few years ago with what one would more accurately characterize as an inappropriate hand gesture! :o)

I also casually noticed a street sign as I drove by, a sign I probably would never have seen in the normal rush of my day, one that demanded I take its picture. Yes, needless to say, this photograph will find its way into a future presentation! I loved it! And one other location required I pull off the road: the old truck in the field of goldenrod set against the backdrop of a cool, cloudless, mountain day. Notice, in the larger pictures available below, someone shot it one time in the center of the hood. If you like it, you can click on one of the pictures at the end of this post for a large version you can use as your desktop picture (Windows users call it Wallpaper.). Yes, the larger version includes an inconspicuous logo for my website. Directions, if needed, are at the end of this post.

The point of this post: Old School Rd. isn't all bad unless it's your final destination. And just as the old truck got put out to pasture, today's technology isn't the answer to all of the complex problems we face in the classroom. (I'm fond of saying that bad teaching with technology is just more bad teaching, faster!) Balance and best instructional practices are essential.

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This blog is about practical practice, right?!

Problem
I get an enormous number of emails. Most principals and teachers get a large number of emails. I suspect we find email glut everywhere, in every profession. Email is so easy to use. But, just at a casual glance, this tool has at least two significant issues.

• The Sender/Receiver Imbalance
A parent can fire off a short email (I have a dear principal colleague who calls some of them "email drive-bys") that requires very little of his or her time but a great deal of time for a thoughtful response. For example: "I was very displeased with Sally's grade on this project. Explain this to me." Two short sentences requiring only a matter of seconds for the sender to type and click "send." However, this email will require the teacher spend several minutes going into some detail to provide a comprehensive explanation, hence creating an imbalance in time commitment.

And, of course, some parents invest a significant amount of time composing lengthy, detailed emails that require a significant amount of time to read, process, and then reply. But even these almost always require more time to reply to than to compose and send or the parent may feel their concern did not get the attention it deserved: hence the imbalance. When the teacher receives many emails each day, this time commitment can add up quickly.

To further exacerbate the problem, teachers typically want to think through their response, provide a detailed and comprehensive answer, and really pay adequate attention to the needs being expressed. This desire for appropriateness requires an investment of valuable time.

• Tonal Concerns
Because we process so much email, we are all but forced to give our replies less attention. In our efforts to economize time spent, we may attempt to use fewer words, leave out entire thoughts and processes or procedures and jump to conclusions.

My email replies often sound all but terse. Such attempts to reduce the time imbalance so as to afford us the time to attend to all of the email in our inbox may be (all too frequently are?) misunderstood as negative emotional tone.

I suspect we have all had instances where our reply was misunderstood because the reader misread the emotional tone of our response. Email is such an effective tool for quick communications between people who know each other well enough to cut the person on the other end of the "digital line" some slack.

I suppose an example would be those short, quick emails you send and receive from your friends that don't even use proper mechanics or complete sentences but communicate effectively and quickly because of the personal relationship already established. But professional emails do not enjoy this personal emotive space, and probably should not.

Solutions?
I personally think that email is not the best tool to use in many instances in which it is used. A quick phone call might do a much better job of communicating the needed attention and emotional tone required to address questions or concerns in a manner that earns support and understanding.

But, perhaps because the original communication was initiated through email, we may feel an email reply is expected. I would encourage educators to rethink this supposition. Perhaps the phone call begins with, "I got your email and wanted to take just a moment to communicate with you personally..." I think often parents feel that they are being less time-invasive by sending the busy teacher the email and avoiding the phone call. If that's the case, then certainly, click reply.

Another very interesting approach I have recently encountered is provided by these websites: two.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, four.sentenc.es, or five.sentenc.es. Check out one of the links just listed. This could be the signature the email might use:

All the best,
Tim
---------------------
Q: Why was this reply just 5 sentences or less?
A: http://five.sentenc.es

Education is a profession all about attending to the needs of people. If I were designing one of these website responses for educators, it would look a bit different than those sited above. At the very least I would also include a statement that might read: "If this short email reply has not adequately addressed your question or concern, feel free to contact me by phone. I would be glad to discuss this in more detail through a phone call."

Final Thought
I am not advocating teachers start using these sites without first having a conversation with your building administration to see if this is in keeping with a larger vision for effective communication with stakeholders. At the very least, the conversations that could unfold among the stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, and administration) might help everyone better understand the most effective communication strategies available to a community of learners.

Black Friday, as the media has dubbed it, is this week: the day the shopping malls sell more "stuff" than any other. Crowds swarm the the overstocked malls in some maniacal quest for the least expensive and most desired. Here in Atlanta past, fights over parking spaces have even resulted in shootings. People show all of the ugliness that is packed into a major metropolitan area with too much traffic, unsustainable appetites, and too little time. Yes, this Friday, this Black Friday, we gear up for the upcoming festivities we celebrate in December. What a glorious season it is.

Frankly, I have grown to hate it. I think the malls here in Atlanta have sensed this growing disgust with Black Friday. In an unusual move, many of the malls have delayed putting up all of the decorations. In past years they were up as early as the first week of October!

And, truth be told, most Americans would probably abolish or greatly simplify these rituals that center more and more around the glutenous consumption of things and food, if they felt they could. But, exactly why can't we? Oh, we do talk about the "reason for the season" but, for all too many, much of our seasonal energy is spent doing that which has little to do with what we say we truly value.

Yes, I just hate it.

So why is my post entitled, "My Favorite Season?" Well, Thanksgiving has always been my favorite season, since my earliest memories in childhood. Aside from the Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim salt and pepper shakers, Thanksgiving has somehow managed to escape the extreme commercialization of other holidays. Thanksgiving is a simpler, quieter holiday that focuses on celebrating our blessings--that in our life which has real value and meaningfulness to us.

From my childhood, Thanksgiving was a time to celebrate the love of family, the gift of health, the blessings of more than we ever needed. We took this season to visit with those family members who were unable to sit around all of the tables of food my mother, grandmother, and great aunts had prepared for the enormous annual extended family feast. This was a time to share by being there, by caring, by speaking of the rich depth of our lives, a time to remember and celebrate those family members who were no longer with us: the beauty of heritage.

Find ways to savor this, my favorite holiday, with those you love.

This is the content of an email I received a couple of weeks ago from a teacher, a teacher for whom I have great respect. I find the questions thought-provoking and deep. Do you feel that sometimes you just don't have the time to reflect deeply?! These are worth a ponder or two...

What if we asked teachers . . .

“Does the education you are providing reflect the best educational experience you have to offer? If not, what keeps you from doing so?”

What if we asked students . . .

“Do you have the ability to do your most meaningful learning at school? If not, what gets in your way?

I think it would be extremely interesting to see what people say - how much of the impairments are "real" and how many are "perceived", how much of the impairment is external vs internal. What would the kids say about learning and the hyper-connected world? Too much connectivity, not enough in their learning? Why?

Sometimes I think we glue too much hope for learning to "connectivity." Sometimes the connectivity actually gets in the way of learning as it can ramp up data flow to unprecedented levels, requiring far more bandwidth than we as "mere" human beings, even with our best tools, can ever begin to process with any level of attentiveness, depth, or meaningfulness. The connectivity can become a distraction. How do we prevent that in the learning environment and use connectivity for purposeful achievement?

To all readers: my website, drTimTyson.com, will be unreachable from Friday, February 8, at 10PM PST until Saturday, February 9, 6AM PST. My hosting company will be doing some work server side. I hope everything will be back up and running no later then Saturday, February 9, 6AM PST.

In the past two weeks I came across two quick reads and two videos that caused me to make some connections worthy of thought.

Bruce Schneier, writing on May 15, 2008, at Wired, made me stop and think about all of the "free" services I routinely explore for their value-added potential in education. I often just make up absurd information when that information is required of me and I don't want to provide it (like, for an email address: noneof@yourbusiness.com). I have never stopped to think about the lifespan or later possible use of this meaningless, inaccurate information. I just don't want any more junk mail. Bruce writes:

Our data is a part of us. It's intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch.

[Source: Our Data, Ourselves ]

We teach children about the socially expected behaviors surrounding our personal physical space from casual to intimate. This article really got me to stop and think about the virtual me, my data (from financial, health, social, professional, civic...) and the socially and legally appropriate ways that information should be touched--information, accurate or not, that comes to represent me and affect decisions made about and for me, perhaps without my knowledge about the decisions ever being made. I might not even know the information was aggregated and used.

I also watched Jonathan Zittrain's presentation (from April 11, 2008, at the Tribeca Grand in NYC) about his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. The video of the presentation (about an hour) is graciously made available by the New York Greater Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society at this link. In the presentation Jonathan talks about the generative nature of the internet versus a new push to use "tethered devices" as he calls them--devices that close innovation and are controlled by the manufacturer even after the sale. [I have written briefly about the internet as an operating system before. Jonathan's ideas helped me clarify some of my thinking.]

He mentions several really interesting examples before extending his examples to the FBI paying to have the OnStar system remotely reprogrammed in a car owned by people of interest to the FBI so that everything spoken in the car was transmitted to the FBI through OnStar without anyone in the car being aware. He goes on to say that because of consumer demand we have built an unrivaled infrastructure that could be leveraged for surveillance (by the good guys and the bad): cell phones and other devices.

And then I read this article about the National Cyber Security Initiative by Ryan Singel at Wired:

... would spend billions on unproven, embryonic technology, and possibly illegal or ill-advised projects, according to the analysis ...

While many of the specifics of the plan are classified, U.S. intelligence chief Michael McConnell told the New Yorker in January that he wants the National Security Agency to begin eavesdropping on the internet, and a McConnell aide said the spy agency was prepared to examine the content of e-mails, file transfers and Google searches without a warrant.

[Source: Report: Government's Cyber Security Plan Is Riddled With New Spying Programs]

I'm not really passing any judgement on these examples. Like most everyone else, I want the bad guys caught. I want us to prevent the bad people from doing bad things to good people. But larger issues may be at stake, issues worthy of careful thought and scrutiny. None of us want to wake up one morning and ask, "How in the world did we get here?!"

The rampant pace at which our technologies are developing is vastly outstripping our awareness of the issues that surround that development and our capacity to have informed conversations about those issues to establish public policy and legal frameworks that are both reasonable, fair, and that appropriately safeguard and balance the best interests of a free democratic society, a capitalist economy, and the rights of the individual. And not only is the pace of development rapid, can it also be completely invisible to public scrutiny and democratic oversight? Should it be? These are complex questions!

And during the week I also came across this video interview, on a less weighty, yet more immediately personal level, at Switched with Clay Shirky, adjunct professor teaching New Media in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Clay really informs my thinking about the internet.

The issues broadly touched on in this post are complex and have long term implications for freedom, safety, democracy, privacy, economic sustainability, to name but a few. In order to have more informed conversations with our children about these significant, developing concerns, we need to have greater public and professional conversation about data security, privacy, and ways we can move our social, political, and legal structures to develop policy frameworks that keep pace with the challenges that technology brings to our daily lives.

These are challenging and exciting times!

Our schools world wide reflect the diversity of our communities, of the people they serve. Schools in caves, in huts, in refugee camps, you will find some interesting pictures of schools around the world. And the way the world's children getting to school are just as interesting: by hanging from a cable as they zip across a rushing river or by cramming into a bicycle bus they have to peddle. The collection of pictures at this link is very interesting.

Here are two pictures to get you started:

Halong bay with a community of around 1600 people live in four fishing villages. They live on floating houses and are sustaining by fishing and marine aquaculture. This is one of the floating schools of the floating fishing village.

Schools the world over, just like people the world over, face some real challenges!

I have had the opportunity to work with many outstanding and effective educators over the course of my career in education. One of them, a young man named Chris Swanson, sent me an email recently that included this:

I was in the new middle school drama teacher's classroom yesterday and noticed a sign that said . . .

Acting: Finding the Truth within the Imaginary Circumstances of the Play

I thought to myself, there is something here - what if we changed this quote a little . . .

Teaching: Finding the Truth within the Imaginary Circumstances of the Classroom.

I'm only on iteration two and am still debating if "Contrived" is better than "Imaginary," but I may be on my way to being able to answer the simple question of what is great teaching.

I suppose that learning is generally initially removed from doing. But how do we as educators collapse the distance between the two? School should never become the replacement for doing but rather a path to propel us further into the meaningful significance of doing that which is relevant and valued, of living truth, of authenticity of being, of creating beauty, of finding creative solutions to the problems faced in human condition, of lifting the soul to a higher place of being and doing.

As you teach your students this year, I hope you strive to supplant the "artifice of school" with a deeper quest for Truth in ways your students can embrace with their passion of soul.

P.S. I love the arts! They reflect Truth. I love people that think! They illuminate the path to Truth. Have a great school year!

Design has always mattered to me—a lot actually. Remember, my background training in college was performance and composition. Music and stage production, both in school and in church, was a major part of my early professional life for many years. I thrilled at staging hundreds of children and adults in huge productions for deeply enthralled audiences. I learned early on that the way anything is presented to the target audience is of critical importance, whether it's a product, a unit of instruction, or a leader's vision of excellence. Simple things were so powerful: using color and lighting to effortlessly focus attention, set emotional tone, and enrich the story's unfolding. Oh, I could write so much about all of this.

Beauty, in all of the many forms it can assume, is near the very core of a satisfied human experience. I wish I had a lot of training in design as I think it represents very critical and creative thinking and problem solving. But, alas, I don't. I just go with my instincts, try to pay attention to why I think something is well designed when I come across it, and read about the topic as I can. In fact, I even have an RSS folders on creativity and design in my aggregator.

Often, presentation slides are visually unappealing, cluttered, sterile—well, just boring. Often website and blogs are noisy and hard to read. The information is so cluttered I don't feel welcomed into the site. In fact, sometimes I feel repelled: too many widgets, banners, animations, and links all competing for attention and mouse focus.

I suspect many children are attracted to this as they get excited when building their social networking pages. After all, one of the things our minds crave is motion: add those animated gifs! More, more! But as I have grown older, the noise wears thin. I find I need a balance between efficient message as well as positive emotional connection.

And I confess to really getting exasperated on corporate sites when I have to click more than 3 mouse clicks to get to what I need. Ease of use is another huge part of design: focus on function and form, in emotionally compelling ways.

At any rate, all of that to say this: I came across two posts a couple of months ago that offer some insight into how people read blogs and web sites. How the eyes move across the web page, just like how the eyes move across the stage in a production or the screen in a movie, matters. This is the quiet, unseen, gentle nudging of attention by the creator.

The writer of these posts then gives some basic, easy ideas for improving your blog or web site's readability. I don't recall the author explicitly suggesting the generous use of white space, but I'll toss that one on the table, just in case it wasn't. These are a quick read for those who have an interest in making your blog or web site easy to read and visually welcoming.

What to do with a visually noisy blog: Part 1: Your template as your visual foundation

Suggestions for a visually noisy blog: Part 2: Ideas for visually simplifying a blog

I'm fairly tech savvy. I would consider myself digitally functionally literate. I can't build computers or write software, but I can use the digital toolset to be creative, to communicate more effectively, and to solve problems. I rather enjoy using technology--when it functions properly. And I'm pretty good at troubleshooting technology when it fails to deliver. I make my living promoting the use of technology to better educate our students--to empower educators and students alike to think more critically and be more creative. So you may find what follows in this post to be a bit unexpected.

One of the big buzz words in technology for the past couple of years has been "convergence." Last weekend I lived an excellent example of convergence: my digital camera communicates to a satellite where I am when I shoot a picture on a hike in a canyon. That location data is stored in the image file's metadata. I then tag the picture with information related to the trip to make it easy for anyone to do a search on Eaton Canyon, on Tim Tyson, on hike, on Pasedena, on waterfall and find the pictures, find me. Yes, even my mom, now in her 70's, still keeps track of me online! Using cell phone technology I can immediately, in real time, upload the pictures to the internet--to my Flickr account, to a Google map that shows where I am, what I'm seeing, how far I'm hiking, how many feet I'm climbing and descending, how fast I'm walking, how many calories I'm burning, how long I'm hiking.

In this real, personal example, my digital camera technology talks to my GPS technology, talks to a software application running on my iPhone, talks to AT&T's 3G network, talks to the internet, talks to Google maps, talks to Flickr's servers, and talks to my blog technology on my server, talks to my home desktop computer that talks to my AppleTV to show my photos when it talks to my television. And I left out lots of other "talks tos" along the way. All of these very different technologies have converged. Now I've given everyone in the world the ability to be with me, to know me better, to hopefully enjoy something I enjoy: hiking in the great outdoors.

Sometimes I feel as though we, those of us who love technology, are in a rush to find the next cool tech toy, to find a way to fit that toy into our lifeflow. What's Apple announcing this year? What's hot at the Consumer Electronics Show? I'm starting to think I'm living a techno feeding frenzy, mindlessly gobbling up the latest and greatest, the fastest and coolest. As I frequently say: "My name is Tim. I'm addicted to technology. I'm not in recovery."

But there's a whole under belly, a dark side, if you will, to technology. I started thinking about this after writing a recent article on transparency in government. Odd, I know.

How many more years will it be before technology convergence will allow anyone in the world to drill down in a Google map to a live street view in the ever expanding surveillance society in which we live? Are we having a national conversation about how technology is quietly impacting personal privacy, limiting access, being used to manipulate and flat deceive? I know a few people occasionally bring up these matters, but are we having a systematic discussion about this? Am I just missing out on it?

With facial recognition technology, GPS--in our cars, cell phones, and now even in our watches, wireless video cameras smaller than a nickel, sophisticated traffic monitoring devices, telephony surveillance, internet search surveillance, at what point will our society be so tethered "to the matrix" that nothing is private? I read in one new year's prediction about what the future holds, that nothing will be private and everything we say, do, purchase, every place we go will be recorded. Our lives will be, according to this prediction, completely digitally documented and databased for instant search. Not too many years ago, sometime in the last century, maybe around 1984?, this prediction would have been the stuff of science fiction, of an amusing Alvin Toffler quick read.

But today, we have smart traffic grids that can tell our car's GPS where the nearest available parking space is (desirable), can give us a ticket the second our meter time expires (undesirable). We can get a ticket when we go through the red light, even if no human traffic enforcement is present. It all goes in a database tagged: you! And, as public record, these "violations" can be search. If that's today, what is in the future if we do not talk about this, and let the technopoly go where ever it wants to quietly go?

And I read and listen to technologist, brilliant people who I admire and respect, say that increasingly our value and worth will be measured by what we contribute, what we share, on the grid. And part of me embraces this, acknowledges it, even sees the benefit of it. While, at the same time, part of me emphatically opposes this trend, wanting my contribution as a human soul to be measured more by my spontaneous warm personal touch as opposed to a cooler, more carefully crafted digital footprint.

I am reminded of an eighth grade girl at Mabry Middle School sharing with me her baby sitting experience. The experience so deeply impacted her she produced a movie called "The Human Touch." She told me that her family took care of a little baby until her mother would get home from work. The very young child loved to watch DVDs. One day while this eighth grader and her mother were running errands, the little child was riding in the back car seat and wanted to watch a DVD. The child spoke her first word! No, not "mama." The child said "TV." Both mother and eighth grader were horrified! Our children are growing up without knowing life was ever different from this.

I've just barely touched the surface here, leaving out many other enormously significant issues. But, I suspect we need to do a better job of talking about more than just internet safety for children. I think we need to begin a national conversation about balancing the technopoly with the human condition. People, society as a whole, certainly our legal structures (copyright, intellectual property, privacy, etc.) and democratic government are currently not equipped (may never be equipped?) to work and change at the speed at which the technopoly is now working and changing. Human nature being what it is, on a global scale with gaping disparities, this can pose a substantive risk to people, to humankind, to you and me.

I believe that humans are not binary. Unlike digital technology, we are more than logic, more than algorithms of flux, variability, probability. We need failure. We need immeasurable distance between "on" and "off." We need privacy. We need time and space off the grid. We need to imagine in only our mind's eye. We need emotive experience. We need to dream the illusive. We need to explore the invisible matters of soul. We need solitude. We need to be able to do a complete "about-face" as we see fit. We need a distraction-free space in which we can focus, find and savor serenity.

In the "old days," in the pre-technopoly days, in the past century, when casually walking down the street minding one's own business, one could see a potential threat approaching and respond appropriately. I'm concerned that in today's burgeoning technopoly of the invisible digital matrix, we will never see the threat to our freedom, to our very human condition, coming.

Yes, we need a national conversation.

[Photo credit: CC by Telstar Logistics at Flickr ]

This short YouTube speaks of marketing in "the good old days" and then the impact of today's social media on marketing. I've always seen teaching, in many ways, as an act of marketing information. (Maybe rotten teaching is seen as spam by our students?) At any rate, great teaching, like great marketing, goes viral.

Golan Levin at TED 2009: "The mouse is the narrowest straw through which you could try to suck all of human expression through."

via: In My Copious Free Time

I'm reading several interesting books at the moment. Here's one of them:

"Universal Principles of Design" (William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler)

As a classically training musician, I long ago came to realize that everything in life is all the same thing. Art, Music, Language, Love, Teaching, Learning, Design, Beauty, yada, yada, yada... it's all the same life force in different manifestations, if you will. As I read this classic text on design, I keep feeling my heart say, "Yes, that's exactly what good teaching is! It's just great design principles applied to learning, that's all." It's deep integration of Grant Wiggin's work on Understanding By Design.

If ever a company understood design, it would be, of all things, a technology company: Apple! One of Apple's key goals has always been to make complex technology look irresistible and easy, even essential, to integrate into your lifestyle. Again, great design is great educational practice. Great educational practice is great design. It's beautiful and welcoming. It appears elegant and simple. It has an allure about it, a curiosity that beckons.

Take a look at the iTunes Store screen shot below. How can you resist going deeper? The button, "Next Steps" is just begging you to click on it! Why, you would feel guilty if you didn't! You would be missing something you might really need, might really want. This is brilliant design! Our blog posts, our assignments, our lessons could all benefit from "Next Steps," from "Deep Cuts!"

As an educator, a teacher, a principal, if you find yourself working too hard to make your staff, your students reach your performance and educational goals, don't just work harder. Don't resort to anger. Don't raise your voice. Don't stress out trying to beat it out of them.

Just revisit your design! How do you make moving to "Next Steps" something each of them feels utterly compelled to do? You want them to know and experience the joy that really is learning and achieving--the essence of all that is beautiful. You want fire in their eyes as time melts away at the behest of going deeper into learning, of taking more personal ownership of their own educational quest.

And the positive energy, over time, begins to build on itself. You return to your center, your love of teaching, your calling.

It's the middle of February, which is always a good time to step back, and revisit your design.

I am migrating to a new hosting service. I've been with DreamHost for several years and have decided to try mediatemple. The process of switching the Domain Name Server (DNS) settings has now begun. This means you will soon be hitting my site on the new server. It also means that my email is in a state of transition from one server to another. I will do my best to avoid losing any emails. But if you have sent me an email and not heard from me by week's end, you may want to send it again in case it got lost in the move.

The migration process has been fairly straight forward, but the email migration is a bit more complicated.

Update: Well, things didn't go quite as smoothly as they appeared to be going. The email server change has especially been problematic. Hopefully those issues are now resolved, I didn't lose any emails (resend if I haven't responded or you got the email returned to you), and you are seeing this page! Technology! :o)

Amazon's mp3 store has another one of those deals today where you can get hours and hours of classical musics for pennies a song: 99 Bach masterpieces (8+ hours!) for $2.99. Even though Bach's works preceded copyright protection, this is a good example of how our culture benefits from sensible copyright term limits: eight hours of some of the finest music ever composed for about the price of a Happy Meal. More good classical music mp3 deals here.

via kottke.org

I've actually been thinking about the horrid outcome of making beauty nothing more than vacuous atmosphere requiring no cognitive or emotive interaction whatsoever, just vague mindless awareness devoid of the rich attention of mind and soul deserved. Then when I read Jason's comment about 99 works of Bach, arguably the greatest composer to ever have walked the face of the earth, for the cost of a happy meal, I laughed out loud--a laugh of sadness.

It's outrageously sad to me that such beauty is so unappreciated, that so many people living today, in a time when we have access to so such of the earth's beauty, don't see, hear, or sense it in any way.

The tools of technology give us unprecedented access to what was unthinkable in the time of J. S. Bach. Today every human being with an internet connection can access pictures, audio, and video of the whole of the earth's human experience. But with that access comes no time to fully embrace the richness of the experience with attention, with comprehension, with deep awareness.

Are we better off?

I would argue that perhaps we are, but only to the extent to which we encounter with appreciative awareness and understanding--appreciation born of a depth of understanding becoming more difficult for all of the distraction.

He makes the claim that people around the world are more alike than they are different. His musical demonstration is nothing short of brilliant. He speaks very little in this audience participation, and I had never heard his speaking voice before. I was actually really shocked! But don't worry, be happy.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Warning: I'm in a mood! Brace yourself. (And I haven't even read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell yet!)

In our food diet, in our creative expression, in general purchasing decisions, in our quarterly return on investments we demand more, more, more. We are quick to make an acceptable level of sacrifice in quality to get a better deal. But the constant small sacrifices all add up. We have begun deceiving ourselves into believing we don't ever have to pay what something really actually costs over both the life of the product and our life expectancy and that of our children's. In fact, I'm not so sure we even consider what the actual cost of anything really is. We believe the lie: we can have everything we ever wanted faster and cheaper than ever before.

We fail to see the connection between the billions we pump into Walmart sales and the loss of manufacturing jobs in our country as well as the devastating human and environmental impact these purchases have on the other side of our ever shrinking world. We have substituted true freedom for freedom of choice on the discount rack. We listen to a steady diet of in today/out tomorrow tripe and wonder why creative artistic expression and careful deliberation that requires attention to nuance and inflection/reflection is dead. Well, we're probably too busy looking for the next big sale or must have hit to even notice the downward spiral massive consumption is really costing us financially, culturally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically. Are our souls so bankrupt?

I have also observed a profound shift in our definition of and practice of faith as well, but I'll avoid this topic on my professional blog.

And I fear our current technology use is no exception. Distilling everything down to binary choices is just craziness: on or off circuits on a circuit board billions of times per second does not adequately represent the substance of soul I consider to be the breath of humanity. And I am an advocate for technology--technology well used to enhance the quality of the human experience, not dilute life with more facsimile, more "good enough" coming at us so fast we don't even notice we are accumulating a whole lot of nothing thinking we have more of something.

I had a great conversation with a university professor and department chair on Monday that was somewhat similar to this. True human connection will, in my humble opinion, never be replaced or adequately approximated by an electronic equivalent. I do not particularly like the direction our culture is rushing without much open, honest, principled thought or discussion.

Perhaps the American Indians understand something our culture completely has missed: Maybe, just maybe, every time you take a picture of someone, you really have stolen just a bit of his or her soul. The approximation is never adequate, but at how many megapixels do we consider it good enough?

The Digital Revolution Killed Quality
By Rick Aristotle Munarriz
August 18, 2009

We owe our senses an apology. In the mad dash for digital convergence, we have made compromises that are cheating our ears and our eyes. We put up with "near" CD and DVD quality, just for the sake of snappy downloads or greater variety from compressed content. Now, quality hounds are about to lose another battle.

Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone is overtaking Canon's (NYSE: CAJ) high-end EOS Rebel XTi as the most popular source for snapshot uploads to Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr.

According to Flick's perpetually updated "camera finder" graph, the iPhone and Rebel XTi are neck-and-neck when it comes to populating the site with imagery.

The iPhone doesn't have a bad camera -- it's just not a very good one, relatively speaking. The new iPhone 3GS introduced autofocus and bumped up the megapixel count from two to three. However, there's no flash. There's no zoom. The quality pales when pitted against Canon's 10.1-megapixel workhorse.

The iPhone's camera may be good enough, but that doesn't mean that it's good.

Regression to compression
We settle for the sake of immediacy and ad-supported freebies. Social networking sites will take your treasured photographs and put the squeeze on their quality for bandwidth's sake. Don't even get me started on the grainy mobile uploads!

We haven't been any kinder to moving pictures. "Instant watching titles are available in multiple levels of video quality," explains Netflix's (Nasdaq: NFLX) website. "Netflix automatically determines the level you receive by analyzing your current Internet speed. You can't select the video quality level yourself, and the level will change from time to time depending on actual network conditions."

It's hard to look a gift stream in the mouth, because Netflix offers digital playback at no additional cost to subscribers of its unlimited DVD plans. However, sometimes you pay and still have to settle for less than the original.

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) doesn't sell movie downloads in high-def. It offers television shows in HD, but it will only spit out temporary rentals if you crave high definition. And only recently did Apple begin selling HD movies through iTunes.

Oh my bleeding earbuds
Audiophiles are suffering, too. Sirius XM Radio (Nasdaq: SIRI) began charging most of its subscribers for online access earlier this year, in exchange for the promise of higher audio standards.

"The upgrading of this service allows for customers to listen at near CD-quality sound (128k) for a better listening experience," reads the site's FAQ.

It's definitely better than the original streams, but will folks really pay between $3 and $13 a month for "near" CD quality?

Then again, the sonic quality of satellite radio itself has long come under fire. "Don't get me wrong, I love Sirius' programming, but I hate the sound," wrote Steve Guttenberg in CNET's The Audiophiliac column last year. "It's grungy, harsh, with no actual high frequencies and muddy bass. The music's dynamics are squashed flat as Kansas so it sounds like a low bit MP3. Digital smigital, Sirius sounds awful, way worse than FM radio."

I'm not hating on satellite radio, because I too can't get enough of Sirius. I've been a subscriber for five years. However, championing quality on satellite radio is often a losing battle. Subscribers want more programming, yet broadening the channel list comes at the expense of crummier compression.

Sure, bitrates have improved over the past year. Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune offers MP3 files as high as 320k. That's a far cry from the 128k standard that most online stores were promoting just two years ago. Still, the MP3 format remains all about compression, even if a smaller subset of the audience notices.

The younger generation may not care. They've grown up jamming on their muddled iPods and watching grainy YouTube videos. They will never know the joys of vinyl wax, clean air, and Crystal Pepsi.

Consumers chose quantity over quality. Until a tech company can deliver both, I say the digital revolution is a failure.

link: The Digital Revolution Killed Quality

This is an interesting PBS 5Across video featuring the conversation among Leif Hansen, Annalee Newitz, Dom Sagolla, Deborah Schultz, and Dr. Jim Taylor about the impact of technology in our lives.

A LexisNexis survey found that if you add up the time people spend using email, web browsers, instant messaging, and Microsoft Office, it comes to 15.9 hours per day. That's extraordinary.

Quotation: MediaShift . 5Across: How to Deal with Technology Overload | PBS

Below is a casual outline I made while listening to the video (and yes, I was multitasking so the outline is very loose). If you would prefer to skip to a particular section in the video that interests you, go to this link at PBS' MediaShift site and watch just that section.

Taking Breaks

• How can technology serve your goals
• How does it get in the way of your goals
• 12 stages: curiosity, invite participation, cut back ... get curious again
• Good or bad? = Is work work good or bad for me
• Rescue time: Break Minder (Windows), Time Out (Mac), Freedom (Mac)
• Input days or Output days

Virtual vs. Real World

• Life is dirty; Tech is cleaner and more linear
• Tech driving us vs. us using it
• Sharing physical space
• Always on, always live
• What can't be digitized from face to face

Online Etiquette

• What are the new rules, the new contexts
• Internet is a teenager
• Reflection versus speed
• Etiquette around when we are to respond to things

Psychological Issues

• External validation
• FOMO (Fear of missing out)
• Technology addiction
• Law of unintended consequences

Benefits of Technology

• Avoid judgement by shedding part of our identity
• Transparency

Implanted Technology

• Biology and technology = deeper disconnect spiritually
• Need info at my fingertips
• Need to be bored which provides discipline
• Expectations of what being present means

David Warlick is among those people who often piques my thinking. In his blog post today, he ended with what I think is a very telling and keen insight.

The world has become more cooperative, not competitive.

link: 2¢ Worth » The World has become A Lot More Interesting

I don't think we should ever discount the power of competitiveness. But I am concerned that the American psyche goes much too far, and in the wrong direction, with the whole notion of competition. Often the emphasis is on "survival of the fittest" in the way we think about most things. Those are very concerning words to me as they suggest someone, or someone's company, or someone's ideas will not survive.

I have always found that the most challenging competition I personally face is with myself--to consistently live a culture of personal best. As a school principal I frequently tried to convey this notion of living a culture of personal best. Our students often understand competition on the ball field as beating the opposing team. But doesn't this implicitly require the player's individual best work in a sense of cooperation with team?

And by some curious disconnect, our students frequently fail to bring that sense of striving to produce personal best work into their academic efforts in school.

I think David has brought to light something profound. In the 21st century, success is to be measured by intrinsic measures more than extrinsic measures such as competition against others, higher test scores from schools, more widgets for less money...

Success is about fulfillment, contribution, empathy, empowerment, cooperation, personal satisfaction. It is feeling-full (internal) more that it is external to our sense of being, or sense of self. Yet I frequently hear as the sole justification for school, preparing students to be "competitive in the global job market." (There was a time when I even fell into this limited way of thinking myself.)

Life is about more than that! And school should be as well. What ever happened to the ideals of the liberal arts education that so deeply focused on intrinsic value?!

The Japanese have a wonderful saying that translates into, "Don't disturb the harmony." They value the interconnectedness of community, the cooperative spirit. I have never met a more gracious and delightful people. The Asian cultures as a whole seem to value cooperation and belonging.

I suspect our culture, our very way of thinking about life, needs to strike a decidedly different balance between the rugged individualism on which this nation was built (which seems to have grown from survival to competitiveness, external rewards, consumption, "It's all about me") and a newfound capacity for cooperation with the other people in our families, in our communities, and in the community of nations as this planet shrinks.

I really believe in my heart that, ultimately, focusing on human empowerment both in our work as educators (and workers generally) and in our educational plans for students will take us much further than test scores ever will. The former is intrinsic, the later is extrinsic. The former is about competing with ourselves, the later is about just doing what it takes to survive. I believe most people want more than mere survival. We want to thrive.

Thanks David, for the inspiration.

This opinion piece, Is the American Dream Over?, in the New York Times today is an interesting read. The comments were at least as intriguing as the article itself. But one of the comments, by M. Crothers, is what really caught my eye:

Dr. Soji Adelaja, Director of the MSU Land Policy Institute was on a local Public Radio program last Thursday. He offered the suggestion that in the 20th Century, people followed jobs (agriculture, manufacturing, entertainment, energy, housing, etc.); in the information century, jobs go with people. The importance of this insight is resonating with me -- every day. His point was that the technologists aren't geographically dependent, but 'smart cities' are cultivating these types of people (i.e. Ann Arbor, MI - the 'life-ring of South Eastern Lower Michigan). As a sign of how fast this is occurring, I am an unemployed commercial television producer with over 15 year experience -- international productions, multi-million dollar budgets, superbowl air dates, etc. I have lots of 'visual storytelling' know how (technical, aesthetic and financial), but after four months looking all over the country, I must conclude that none of this matters. Unless your skill set is 100% digital, your past is negligible if not simply a commodity in a market overrun with adequate/competent suppliers. So, it's get digital or die trying.

In the rush to leverage technology in the learning (school) environment, we must never forget that knowing how to create digital media (for example: making podcasts, digital movies, digital storytelling) or collaborate and share using a blog, ning, or wiki is not the end goal. We have the far more complex task of empowering people to make significant contributions that matter, that transcend geographic limitations, using the understandings they build from the curricular knowledge we teach with and through the new digital tool set as well as traditional tools.

Problem solving, critical thinking, acquiring essential, relevant and accurate information, persuasive presentation... all of the things now commonly referred to as 21st century skills must focus on preparing today's learners to create a "quality of life" not simply a standard of living.

We live in such interesting, challenging, and complex times.

As I watched this, I was struck by the fact that today, perhaps more than any time before, we live in a world of our own making. With technology, we can create what appears to be a physical space that is really only our imaginations projected before our eyes, but with such detail that we can not discern it from a real physical space.

This short video breaks down the composite layers to unfold just a bit of the sophisticated technical and artistic mastery required to produce such a beautiful piece.

Where will this technical possibility take us? But perhaps the more important question is where will we take the technical possibility we have before us? I wish I heard more conversation about this later question.

I came across this quotation from Henri Nouwen that was share by Mike Todd. I am convinced we so underestimate the power of vision and the role vision plays in leadership in the classroom with our students, the principal's office, the district office. Vision sets the tone, the attitude, the space in which the human spirit will thrive or wither.

Energizing Visions are the great visions of the ultimate peace among all people and the ultimate harmony of all creation just utopian fairy tales? No, they are not! They correspond to the deepest longings of the human heart and point to the truth waiting to be revealed beyond all lies and deceptions. These visions nurture our souls and strengthen our hearts. They offer us hope when we are close to despair, courage when we are tempted to give up on life, and trust when suspicion seems the more logical attitude. Without these visions our deepest aspirations, which give us the energy to overcome great obstacles and painful setbacks, will be dulled and our lives will become flat, boring, and finally destructive. Our visions enable us to live the full life.”"

[Via: Energizing Visions.]

I'm happy to report that Twitter reset my account. I can now Tweet again. I'm not exactly sure what made it stop working. It just happened. But, now I'm up and can Tweet again!

Sorry, but comments are being disabled for a while. My site has been under a major spam attack. After the bots move on, I'll open comments back up again, and with a CAPTCHA installed.

Well, out here on the Pacific Coast, the flowers are beginning to bloom, and the trees are starting to bud. (I hate to tell my east coast friends who are now digging out of what will hopefully be their last snow of the season, that, in truth, the flowers never stopped blooming out here. We had roses blooming every month in the garden!) But, with the sun re-appearing and frigid temperatures beginning to wane, I say it's time for some Spring Cleaning!

I have three great suggestions for us all...

1. Clean up that messy computer hard drive!
Is your hard drive like mine? Where does all of the clutter come from, and why am I so afraid to trash those files I will never revisit again?! Well, today I've been unburdening my computer of every file I can trash.

For Mac users, I recommend OmniDiskSweeper because it's free! It scans your computer and lists your files, by categories, in order from the largest files in each category to the smallest ones. (I'm sure my Windows friends have similar utilities.) I've gone through those files looking for what I can trash and what I can permanently archive and remove from my laptop hard drive. I'm amazed at what I've accumulated over the years!

Next, I tackled orphaned files--those files that are no longer used on my computer because the applications associated with them have long since been deleted. I used CleanApp to identify and delete those. It only costs $15 and does a lot more--like identifying those files you haven't used in forever. Then, I deleted some old applications I never use. (CleanApp offers to delete those hidden files, like the preference files, etc. associated with the app too.) Several other apps are available to assist with this type of task, I just chose CleanApp.

This process has now reclaimed nearly 100 GB of much-needed disk space! I feel as if I've been on a successful diet plan!

2. Clean up that messy computer desktop!
No matter how hard I try, my computer desktop gets cluttered with things I need to get to, but just not right now. I try really hard to keep documents located in a folder, in my documents folder, for the application that created the original file. But try as I might...

So today I cleaned up the computer desktop by placing all of those miscellaneous files in their correct and logical place. It's completely free!

3. Purchase an automatic offsite backup plan/service!
I personally use Backblaze (Mac and Windows) as I find it to be very reasonably priced and hassle-free. I've used it now for over a year. No matter how many disks you have routinely connected to your machine, no matter how large the capacity of these disks, Backblaze only charges you $50 per year per computer. (I was afraid of services that charged incrementally as I had no idea what I would actually be spending per year. Backblaze is one fixed price!)

After setup, Blackblaze automatically and constantly keeps the files on your machine, unless you choose to exclude them, encrypted and copied safely on the great server in the sky. So if the house burns down, if someone steals my computers, if California falls into the Pacific Ocean, I can restore my machines, once they are replaced, to the state they were in when I used them last. I love that peace of mind.

Having my time capsule backup doesn't save all of my data (because I have too many external hard drives filled with data) nor does it protect my data should the time capsule be stolen or destroyed with my computer. With Backblaze, I don't worry at all.

So, for the first spring cleaning for the new decade, why not join me in getting your machines nice and tidy! You'll be glad you did.

I was probably like most people: I used the same password over and over for nearly everything. After all, keeping up with all of the different UserIDs and Passwords can become a huge, difficult-to-manage ordeal. With just a small number of passwords, you could have taken over my life.

No more!

After having my professional Twitter account compromised a few weeks ago, and going through about 2 weeks of tech support with Twitter to get it resolved, I decided it was time for me to get serious about online security. What a drag!

Not really!

I revisited a program I had used a couple of years ago when it first came out: 1Password. (Similar programs exist for Windows users: search link.) A couple of years ago I abandoned this tool after giving it a trial run. It had too many limitations. But, now on version 3, 1Password is much more robust, and I really like it.

1Password stores online detailed login information, account information (like email, ftp, router, database, and server settings, etc.), identities (for filling out those pesky online forms requiring name, address, email, phone numbers... for business use, personal use, volunteer use.), software licenses, and more. This information can all be shared between multiple devices (like your iPhone, iPod Touch, laptop, desktop). And, best of all, is made easily available to your various browsers.

Because 1Password will generate long, obtuse, secure passwords for you when you go to set up an online account at any web site, now everything requiring a password has a different one that would be a stupendous challenge for the dark side to figure out. And if the evil hackers did break one, that's the only one they have. Each site has a unique password that is equally as difficult to guess.

What I love most though, is how easily the information is retrieved for my later use. For example: If I want to post to this blog, I have to log in to it. I can now do that 1 of 2 ways. I can launch 1Password; do a quick search for this blog in my list of 64 log ins, and double click it. 1Password launches my browser and logs me in.

Or, I could launch my browser and go to the URL required to log in to my blog, just as I have always done. At the top of my menubar and at the top of my browser window, I have a 1Password button. When I click it, the top choice is "Fill & Submit." When I select that, 1Password fills in the login credentials for that webpage and logs me in. The process is now much faster, much simpler, and much more secure than before!

Really easy!

In the past, whenever I setup an online account (and I tend to do this a lot), I had to be certain I wrote down the URL, the UserID, and the password on my password reminder sheet. I especially hated those sites that had password requirements and restrictions: "Your password must contain at least ## numbers," or "Your password must be ## or more characters," etc. 1Password makes all of this so much easier and more secure!

Passwords can be easily tagged for later search and retrieval. Emails and other documents (containing login confirmation information or serial numbers) can be attached to your 1Password logins or software serial numbers. 1Password even maintains a password history log. And, if you wish, you can print out your detailed information and place it in your bank vault. :o)

So, as part of this Spring Cleaning season, join me in organizing your passwords, making them far more secure and much easier for you to use. Start using a password management system like 1Password!

[I am in no way associated or affiliated with 1Password. I bought the application like anyone else would and use it and like it! Your mileage may vary. Numerous other options are available.]